Fragments
Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers
Part Two: The Free Spirit
Part Three: The Religious Nature
Part Four: Maxims and Interludes
Part Five: On the Natural History of Morals
Part Six: We Scholars
Part Seven: Our Virtues
Part Eight: Peoples and Fatherlands
Part Nine: What is Noble?
Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers
Do Not Have a Normal One
But the struggle against Plato, or, to express it more plainly and for ‘the people’, the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia - for Christianity is Platonism for ‘the people’ - has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit such as has never existed on earth before: with so tense a bow one can now shoot for the most distant targets. European man feels this tension as a state of distress, to be sure; and there have already been two grand attempts to relax the bow, once by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of democratic enlightenment - which latter may in fact, with the aid of freedom of the press and the reading of newspapers, achieve a state of affairs in which the spirit would no longer so easily feel itself to be a ‘need’! (The Germans invented gun-powder - all credit to them! But they evened the score again - they invented the press.) But we who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even sufficiently German, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits - we have it still, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the task and, who knows? the target…
What Does Going Beyond Good and Evil Mean?
The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. (§ 4)
Perspectivism and a Philosophers Tyrannical Drive
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown. (§ 6)
But this is an old and never-ending story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to ‘creation of the world’, to causa prima. (§ 9)
In short, moralities too are only a sing-language of the emotions. (§ 187)
Life As Such Is Will To Power
Physiologists should think again before postulating the drive to self-preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing desires above all to vent its strength — life as such is will to power : self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it. (§ 13)
Part Two: The Free Spirit
Beware of Martyrdom
After so cheerful an exordium a serious word would like to be heard: it addresses itself to the most serious. Take care, philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering ‘for the sake of truth’! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience, it makes you obstinate against rebuffs and red rags, it makes you stupid, brutal and bullish if in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, casting out and even grosser consequences of hostility you finally even have to act as defenders of truth on earth - as if ‘truth’ were so innocuous and inept a person she stood in need of defending! (§ 24)
A Republican Reminder to Liberalism
All company is bad company except the company of one's equals. (§ 26)
The Pathos of Distance: Free Spirits Are Rare
Few are made for independence — it is a privilege of the strong. And he who attempts it, having the completest right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the smallest of which is that no one can behold how and where he goes astray, is cut off from others, and is torn to pieces limb from limb by some cave — minotaur of conscience. If such a one is destroyed, it takes place so far from the understanding of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize — and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to the pity of men! — (§ 29)
Our supreme insights must — and should! — sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes, when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are not predisposed and predestined for them…What serves the higher type of man as food or refreshment must to a very different and inferior type be almost poison. (§ 30)
Something might be true although at the same time harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it could pertain to the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would destroy one — so that the strength of a spirit could be measured by how much ‘truth’ it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified. (§ 39)
Are they new friends of ‘truth’, these coming philosophers? In all probability: for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths. But certainly they will not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, and also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman, which has hitherto been the secret desire and hidden sense of all dogmatic endeavours. ‘My judgement is my judgement: another cannot easily acquire a right to it’ — such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say. One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a ‘common good’! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare. (§ 43)
Us Against The Herd
In all the countries of Europe and likewise in America there exists at present something that misuses this name, a very narrow, enclosed, chained up species of spirits who desire practically the opposite of that which informs our aims and instincts — not to mention the fact that in regard to those new philosophers appearing they must certainly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, in short and regrettably, among the levelers, these falsely named ‘free spirits’ — eloquent and tirelessly scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’, men without solitude one and all, without their own solitude, good clumsy fellows who, while they cannot be denied courage and moral respectability, are unfree and ludicrously superficial, above all in their fundamental inclination to see in the forms of existing society the cause of practically all human failure and misery: which is to stand the truth happily on its head! What with all their might they would like to strive after is the universal green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety, comfort and an easier life for all; their two most oft-recited doctrines and duties are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ — and suffering itself they take for something that has to be abolished. (§ 44)
We, who are the opposite of this, and have opened our eyes and our conscience to the question where and how the plant ‘man’ has hitherto grown up most vigorously, we think that this has always happened under the opposite conditions, that the perilousness of his situation had first to become tremendous, his powers of invention and dissimulation (his ‘spirit’ — ) had, under protracted pressure and constraint, to evolve into subtlety and daring, his will to life had to be intensified into unconditional will to power — we think that severity, force, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, dreadful, tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species ‘man’ just as much as does its opposite — we do not say enough when we say even that much, and at any rate we are, in what we say and do not say on this point, at the other end from all modern ideology and herd desiderata: at its antipodes perhaps? (§ 44)
Part Three: The Religious Nature
Enlightenment and Democracy Do Not Mix
Enlightenment’ enrages: for the slave wants the unconditional, he understands in the domain of morality too only the tyrannical, he loves as he hates, without nuance, into the depths of him, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness — the great hidden suffering he feels is enraged at the noble taste which seems to deny suffering. Scepticism towards suffering, at bottom no more than a pose of aristocratic morality, was likewise not the least contributory cause of the last great slave revolt which began with the French Revolution. (§ 46)
The Penultimate Man
Among those in Germany for example who nowadays live without religion, I find people whose ‘free-thinking’ is of differing kinds and origins but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness from generation to generation has extinguished the religious instincts: so that they no longer have any idea what religions are supposed to be for and as it were merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. They feel they are already fully occupied, these worthy people, whether with their businesses or with their pleasures, not to speak of the ‘fatherland’ and the newspapers and ‘family duties’: it seems that they have no time at all left for religion, especially as it is not clear to them whether it involves another business or another pleasure - for they tell themselves it is not possible that one goes to church simply to make oneself miserable. They are not opposed to religious usages; if participation in such usages is demanded in certain cases, by the state for instance, they do what is demanded of them as one does so many things - with patient and modest seriousness and without much curiosity and discomfort - it is only that they live too much aside and outside even to feel the need for any for or against in such things. (§ 58)
Modern Christianity Has Turned Europeans Into Weak Herd Animals
And yet, when they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and stay to the irresolute, and lured those who were inwardly shattered and had become savage away from society into monasteries and houses of correction for the soul: what did they have to do in addition so as thus, with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to work at the preservation of everything sick and suffering, which means in fact and truth at the corruption of the European race! Stand all evaluations on their head — that is what they had to do! And smash the strong, contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down everything autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts proper to the highest and most successful of the type ‘man’, into uncertainty, remorse of conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly — that is the task the church set itself and had to set itself, until in its evaluation ‘unworldliness’, ‘unsensuality’, and ‘higher man’ were finally fused together into one feeling.
Supposing one were able to view the strangely painful and at the same time coarse and subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and unconcerned eye of an Epicurean god, I believe there would be no end to one's laughter and amazement: for does it not seem that one will has dominated Europe for eighteen centuries, the will to make of man a sublime abortion? But he who, with an opposite desire, no longer Epicurean but with some divine hammer in his hand, approached this almost deliberate degeneration and stunting of man such as constitutes the European Christian (Pascal for instance), would he not have to cry out in rage, in pity, in horror: ‘O you fools, you presumptuous, pitying fools, what have you done! Was this a work for your hands! How you have bungled and botched my beautiful stone! What a thing for you to take upon yourselves!’ — What I am saying is: Christianity has been the most fatal kind of self-presumption ever. Men not high or hard enough for the artistic refashioning of mankind; men not strong or farsighted enough for the sublime self-constraint needed to allow the foreground law of thousandfold failure and perishing to prevail; men not noble enough to see the abysmal disparity in order of rank and abysm of rank between men and man — it is such men who, with their ‘equal before God’, have hitherto ruled over the destiny of Europe, until at last a shrunken, almost ludicrous species, a herd animal, something full of goodwill, sickly and mediocre has been bred, the European of today… (§ 62)
Part Four: Maxims and Interludes
It is not the strength but the duration of exalted sensations which makes exalted men. (§ 72)
Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself. (§ 76)
‘Pity for all’ — would be harshness and tyranny for you, my neighbour! (§ 82)
Woman learns how to hate to the extent that she unlearns how — to charm. (§ 84)
Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play. (§ 94)
One ought to depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa - blessing rather than in love with it. (§ 96)
To close your ears to even the best counter-argument once the decision has been taken: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity. (§ 107)
There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena… (§ 108)
The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities. (§ 116)
Disgust with dirt can be so great that it prevents us from cleaning ourselves - from ‘justifying’ ourselves. (§ 119)
A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. - Yes: and then to get round them. (§ 126)
All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth comes only from the senses. (§ 134)
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality. Unfruitfulness itself disposes one to a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may be allowed to say so, ‘the unfruitful animal’. (§ 144)
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. (§ 146)
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. (§ 153)
Objection, evasion, happy distrust, pleasure in mockery are signs of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology. (§ 154)
Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule. (§ 156)
Pity in a man of knowledge seems almost ludicrous, like sensitive hands on a cyclops. (§ 171)
The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity. (§ 176)
Perhaps no one has ever been sufficiently truthful about what ‘truthfulness’ is. (§ 177)
There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause. (§ 180)
It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed. (§ 181)
There is a wild spirit of good-naturedness which looks like malice. (§ 184)
‘I do not like it.’ — Why? — ‘I am not up to it.’ - Has anyone ever answered like that? (§ 184)
Part Five: On the Natural History of Morals
The Slave Rebellion In Morality
The Jews — a people ‘born for slavery’ as Tacitus and the whole ancient world says, ‘the chosen people’ as they themselves say and believe — the Jews achieved that miracle of inversion of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple of millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination — their prophets fused ‘rich’, ‘godless’, ‘evil’, ‘violent’, ‘sensual’ into one and were the first to coin the word ‘world’ as a term of infamy. It is in this inversion of values (with which is involved the employment of the word for ‘poor’ as a synonym of ‘holy’ and ‘friend’) that the significance of the Jewish people resides: with them there begins the slave revolt in morals. (§ 195)
Old-Woman Wisdom
All these moralities which address themselves to the individual person, for the promotion of his ‘happiness’ as they say — what are they but prescriptions for behaviour in relation to the degree of perilousness in which the individual person lives with himself; recipes to counter his passions, his good and bad inclinations in so far as they have will to power in them and would like to play the tyrant; great and little artifices and acts of prudence to which there clings the nook-and-cranny odour of ancient household remedies and old-woman wisdom; one and all baroque and unreasonable in form — because they address themselves to ‘all’, because they generalize where generalization is impermissible — speaking unconditionally one and all, taking themselves for unconditional, flavoured with more than one grain of salt, indeed tolerable only, and occasionally even tempting, when they learn to smell over- spiced and dangerous, to smell above all of ‘the other world’: all this is, from an intellectual point of view, of little value and far from constituting ‘science’, not to speak of ‘wisdom’, but rather, to say it again and to say it thrice, prudence, prudence, prudence, mingled with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity — whether it be that indifference and statuesque coldness towards the passionate folly of the emotions which the Stoics advised and applied; or that no-more-laughing and no-more-weeping of Spinoza, that destruction of the emotions through analysis and vivisection which he advocated so naively; or that depression of the emotions to a harmless mean at which they may be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morals; even morality as enjoyment of the emotions in a deliberate thinning down and spiritualization through the symbolism of art, as music for instance, or as love of God or love of man for the sake of God — for in religion the passions again acquire civic right. (§ 198)
The Herd Instinct Is Common; the Noble Instinct is Rare
The strange narrowness of human evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. (§ 199)
The Moral Hypocrisy of the Today’s Commanders
If we think of this instinct taken to its ultimate extravagance there would be no commanders or independent men at all; or, if they existed, they would suffer from a bad conscience and in order to be able to command would have to practice a deceit upon themselves: the deceit, that is, that they too were only obeying.
This state of things actually exists in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands (commands of ancestors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law or even of God), or even to borrow herd maxims from the herd's way of thinking and appear as ‘the first servant of the people’ for example, or as ‘instruments of the common good’.
On the other hand, the herd-man in Europe today makes himself out to be the only permissible kind of man and glorifies the qualities through which he is tame, peaceable and useful to the herd as the real human virtues: namely public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, forbearance, pity. (§ 199)
Napoleon: A Commander With a Good Conscience
In those cases, however, in which leaders and bell-wethers are thought to be indispensable, there is attempt after attempt to substitute for them an adding-together of clever herd-men: this, for example, is the origin of all parliamentary constitutions. All this notwithstanding, what a blessing, what a release from a burden becoming intolerable, the appearance of an unconditional commander is for this herd-animal European, the effect produced by the appearance of Napoleon is the latest great witness — the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness this entire century has attained in its most valuable men and moments. (§ 199)
Last Men Allow the War Within Themselves to Die
Such a man of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a rather weak man: his fundamental desire is that the war which he is should come to an end; happiness appears to him, in accord with a sedative (for example Epicurean or Christian) medicine and mode of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of repose, of tranquility, of satiety, of unity at last attained, as a ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’, to quote the holy rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man. (§ 200)
Eternal Recurrence of Caesar-Type Men
— If, however, the contrariety and war in such a nature should act as one more stimulus and enticement to life — and if, on the other hand, in addition to powerful and irreconcilable drives, there has also been inherited and cultivated a proper mastery and subtlety in conducting a war against oneself, that is to say self-control, self-outwitting: then there arise those marvelously incomprehensible and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and the seduction of others, the fairest examples of which are Alcibiades and Caesar (— to whom I should like to add that first European agreeable to my taste, the Hohenstaufen Friedrich II), and among artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci.
They appear in precisely the same ages as those in which that rather weak type with his desire for rest comes to the fore: the two types belong together and originate in the same causes. (§ 200)
Progress: Herd’s Imposition of Safetyism on the Great
Ultimately ‘love of one's neighbour’ is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear of one's neighbour. Once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one's neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness, foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which hitherto had not only to be honored from the point of view of their social utility — under different names, naturally, from those chosen here — but also mightily developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous — now that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking — and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny.
The antithetical drives and inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little that is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now the moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality.
When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self- effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours.
Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one's feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust, ‘the lamb’, even more ‘the sheep’, is held in higher and higher respect. There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tendemess in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal , and does so honestly and wholeheartedly. Punishment: that seems to it somehow unfair — certainly the idea of ‘being punished’ and ‘having to punish’ is unpleasant to it, makes it afraid. ‘Is it not enough to render him harmless ? why punish him as well? To administer punishment is itself dreadful!’ — with this question herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate conclusion.
Supposing all danger, the cause of fear, could be abolished, this morality would therewith also be abolished: it would no longer be necessary, it would no longer regard itself as necessary! — He who examines the conscience of the present day European will have to extract from a thousand moral recesses and hiding-places always the same imperative, the imperative of herd timidity: ‘we wish that there will one day no longer be anything to fear! One day — everywhere in Europe the will and way to that day is now called ‘progress’. (§ 201)
Christianity and Democracy Cultivate Herd Morality
Morality is in Europe today herd-animal morality — that is to say, as we understand the thing, only one kind of human morality beside which, before which, after which many other, above all higher, moralities are possible or ought to be possible. But against such a ‘possibility’, against such an ‘ought’, this morality defends itself with all its might: it says, obstinately and stubbornly, ‘I am morality itself, and nothing is morality besides me!’ — indeed, with the aid of a religion which has gratified and flattered the sublimest herd-animal desires, it has got to the point where we discover even in political and social institutions an increasingly evident expression of this morality: the democratic movement inherits the Christian.
But that the tempo of this movement is much too slow and somnolent for the more impatient, for the sick and suffering of the said instinct, is attested by the ever more frantic baying, the ever more undisguised fang-baring of the anarchist dogs which now rove the streets of European culture: apparently the reverse of the placidly industrious democrats and revolutionary ideologists, and even more so of the stupid philosophasters and brotherhood fanatics who call themselves socialists and want a ‘free society’, they are in fact at one with them all in their total and instinctive hostility towards every form of society other than that of the autonomous herd (to the point of repudiating even the concepts ‘master’ and ‘servant;’ at one in their tenacious opposition to every special claim, every special right and privilege (that is to say, in the last resort to every right: for when everyone is equal no one will need any ‘rights’ —); at one in their mistrust of punitive justice (as if it were an assault on the weaker, an injustice against the necessary consequence of all previous society — ); but equally at one in the religion of pity, in sympathy with whatever feels, lives, suffers (down as far as the animals, up as far as ‘God’ — the extravagance of ‘pity for God’ belongs in a democratic era - ); at one, one and all, in the cry and impatience of pity, in mortal hatred for suffering in general, in their almost feminine incapacity to remain spectators of suffering, to let suffer; at one in their involuntary gloom and sensitivity, under whose spell Europe seems threatened with a new Buddhism; at one in their faith in the morality of mutual pity, as if it were morality in itself and the pinnacle, the attained pinnacle of man, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of the present and the great redemption from all the guilt of the past — at one, one and all, in their faith in the community as the saviour, that is to say in the herd, in ‘themselves’… (§ 202)
New Philosophers Must Invert Slave Morality
We, who have a different faith — we, to whom the democratic movement is not merely a form assumed by political organization in decay but also a form assumed by man in decay, that is to say in diminishment, in process of becoming mediocre and losing his value: whither must we direct our hopes? — Towards new philosophers, we have no other choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to make a start on antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse ‘eternal values’; towards heralds and forerunners, towards men of the future who in the present knot together the constraint which compels the will of millennia on to new paths. To teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and breeding so as to make an end of that gruesome dominion of chance and nonsense that has hitherto been called ‘history’ — the nonsense of the ‘greatest number’ is only its latest form — : for that a new kind of philosopher and commander will some time be needed, in face of whom whatever has existed on earth of hidden, dreadful and benevolent spirits may well look pale and dwarfed. It is the image of such leaders which hovers before our eyes — may I say that aloud, you free spirits? (§ 203)
The circumstances one would have in part to create, in part to employ, to bring them into existence; the conjectural paths and tests by virtue of which a soul could grow to such height and power it would feel compelled to these tasks; a revaluation of values under whose novel pressure and hammer a conscience would be steeled, a heart transformed to brass, so that it might endure the weight of such a responsibility; on the other hand, the need for such leaders, the terrible danger they might not appear or might fail or might degenerate — these are our proper cares and concerns, do you know that, you free spirits? (§ 203)
Modern Man Became the Perfect Herd Animal
The collective degeneration of man down to that which the socialist dolts and blockheads today see as their ‘man of the future’ — as their ideal! — this degeneration and diminution of man to the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to the man of the ‘free society’), this animalization of man to the pygmy animal of equal rights and equal pretensions is possible, there is no doubt about that! He who has once thought this possibility through to the end knows one more kind of disgust than other men do — and perhaps also a new task!…(§ 203)
Part Six: We Scholars
The Time for Petty Politics Has Past
There [in Russia] the strength to will has for long been stored up and kept in reserve, there the will is waiting menacingly — uncertain whether it is a will to deny or a will to affirm - in readiness to discharge itself, to borrow one of the physicists' favourite words. It may need not only wars in India and Asian involvements to relieve Europe of the greatest danger facing it, but also internal eruptions, the explosion of the empire into small fragments, and above all the introduction of the parliamentary imbecility, including the obligation upon everyone to read his newspaper at breakfast. I do not say this because I desire it: the reverse would be more after my heart — I mean such an increase in the Russian threat that Europe would have to resolve to become equally threatening, namely to acquire a single will by means of a new caste dominating all Europe, a protracted terrible will of its own which could set its objectives thousands of years ahead - so that the long-drawn-out comedy of its petty states and the divided will of its dynasties and democracies should finally come to an end. The time for petty politics is past: the very next century will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the whole earth — the compulsion to grand politics. (§ 205)
Actual Philosophers are Lawgivers
[Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is -will to power]
Actual philosophers, however, are commanders and law-givers: they say ‘thus it shall be!’, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical labourers, of all those who have subdued the past — they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is — will to power. — Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?... (§ 211)
Part Seven: Our Virtues
Universal Equality Is the Will to Power of the Weak
Moral judgement and condemnation is the favourite form of revenge of the spiritually limited on those who are less so, likewise a form of compensation for their having been neglected by nature, finally an occasion for acquiring spirit and becoming refined - malice spiritualizes. Deep in their hearts they are glad there exists a standard according to which those overloaded with the goods and privileges of the spirit are their equals — they struggle for the ‘equality of all before God’ and it is virtually for that purpose that they need the belief in God. (§ 219)
The Historical Sense: Blessing or Curse?
That as men of the ‘historical sense’ we have our virtues is not to be denied — we are unpretentious, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-restraint, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating — with all that, we are perhaps not very ‘tasteful’. Let us finally confess it to ourselves: that which we men of the ‘historical sense’ find hardest to grasp, to feel, taste, love, that which at bottom finds us prejudiced and almost hostile, is just what is complete and wholly mature in every art and culture, that which constitutes actual nobility in works and in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldness and coldness displayed by all things which have become perfect.
Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense necessarily stands opposed to good taste, or to the very best taste at any rate, and it is precisely the brief little pieces of good luck and transfiguration of human life that here and there come flashing up which we find most difficult and laboursome to evoke in ourselves: those miraculous moments when a great power voluntarily halted before the boundless and immeasurable — when a superfluity of subtle delight in sudden restraint and petrifaction, in standing firm and fixing oneself, was enjoyed on a ground still trembling. Measure is alien to us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a charging steed we let fall the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians — and attain our state of bliss only when we are most — in danger. (§ 224)
Suffering Necessary
In man, creature and creator are united: in man there is matter, fragment, excess, clay, mud, madness, chaos; but in man there is also creator, sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divine spectator and the seventh day — do you understand this antithesis? And that your pity is for the ‘creature in man’, for that which has to be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, refined — that which has to suffer and should suffer? And our pity — do you not grasp whom our opposite pity is for when it defends itself against your pity as the worst of all pampering and weakening? (§ 225)
Critique of "General Welfare"
Not one of all these ponderous herd animals with their uneasy conscience (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as the cause of the general welfare — ) wants to know or scent that the ‘general welfare’ is not an ideal, or a goal, or a concept that can be grasped at all, but only an emetic — that what is right for one cannot by any means therefore be right for another, that the demand for one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and man, consequently also between morality and morality. (§ 228)
Explanation for Contemporary Suspicion of Strength and Vitality
In late ages which may be proud of their humaneness there remains so much fear, so much superstitious fear of the ‘savage cruel beast’, to have mastered which constitutes the very pride of those more humane ages, that even palpable truths as if by general agreement, remain unspoken for centuries, because they seem as though they might help to bring back to life that savage beast which has been finally laid to rest. Perhaps I am risking something when I let one of these truths escape: let others capture it again and give it sufficient of the ‘milk of pious thoughts’ for it to lie still and forgotten in its old corner.
— One should open one's eyes and take a new look at cruelty; one should at last grow impatient, so that the kind of immodest fat errors which have, for example, been fostered about tragedy by ancient and modern philosophers should no longer go stalking virtuously and confidently about. Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty — this is my proposition; the ‘wild beast’ has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become — deified. That which constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; that which produces a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, indeed fundamentally in everything sublime up to the highest and most refined thrills of metaphysics, derives its sweetness solely from the ingredient of cruelty mixed in with it.
What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the Cross, the Spaniard watching burnings or bullfights, the Japanese of today crowding into the tragedy, the Parisian suburban workman who has a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who, with will suspended, ‘experiences’ Tristan und Isolde — what all of these enjoy and look with secret ardour to imbibe is the spicy potion of the great Circe ‘cruelty’. Here, to be sure, we must put aside the thick-witted psychology of former times which had to teach of cruelty only that it had its origin in the sight of the sufferings of others: there is also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment of one's own suffering, of making oneself suffer — and wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self- mutilation, as among Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general to desensualization, decarnalization, contrition, to Puritanical spasms of repentance, to conscience- vivisection and to a Pascalian sacrifizio dell' intelletto, he is secretly lured and urged onward by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrills of cruelty directed against himself.
Consider, finally, how even the man of knowledge, when he compels his spirit to knowledge which is counter to the inclination of his spirit and frequently also to the desires of his heart — by saying No, that is, when he would like to affirm, love, worship — disposes as an artist in and transfigure of cruelty; in all taking things seriously and thoroughly, indeed, there is already a violation, a desire to hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which ceaselessly strives for appearance and the superficial — in all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty. (§ 229)
On Women
Equality Among the Sexes
To blunder over the fundamental problem of ‘man and woman’, to deny here the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps to dream here of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and duties: this is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness, and a thinker who has proved himself to be shallow on this dangerous point - shallow of instinct! - may be regarded as suspect in general, more, as betrayed, as found out: he will probably be too ‘short’ for all the fundamental questions of life, those of life in the future too, incapable of any depth. On the other hand, a man who has depth, in his spirit as well as in his desires, and also that depth of benevolence which is capable of hardness and severity and is easily confused with them, can think of woman only in an oriental way - he must conceive of woman as a possession, as property with lock and key, as something predestined for service and attaining her fulfilment in service - in this matter he must take his stand on the tremendous intelligence of Asia, on Asia's superiority of instinct, as the Greeks formerly did: they were Asia's best heirs and pupils and, as is well known, from Homer to the age of Pericles, with the increase of their culture and the amplitude of their powers, also became step by step more strict with women, in short more oriental. How necessary, how logical, how humanly desirable even, this was: let each ponder for himself! (§ 238)
Women Abuse Respect Given in Modern Democratic Age
The weak sex has in no age been treated by men with such respect as it is in ours - that pertains to the democratic inclination and fundamental taste, as does disrespectfulness to old age -: is it any wonder if this respect is immediately abused? She wants more, she learns to demand, in the end she finds this tribute of respect almost offensive, she would prefer competition for rights, indeed a real stand-up fight: enough, woman loses in modesty. Let us add at once that she also loses in taste. (§ 238)
Woman unlearns Fear of Man
She unlearns fear of man: but the woman who ‘unlearns fear’ sacrifices her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture out when the fear-inspiring in man, let us put it more precisely and say the man in man, is no longer desired and developed, is fair enough, also comprehensible enough; what is harder to comprehend is that, through precisely this fact - woman degenerates. (§ 238)
Woman as Clerk Stands Inscribed on the Portal of Modern Society Now Taking Shape
This is what is happening today: let us not deceive ourselves! Wherever the spirit of industry has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit woman now aspires to the economic and legal independence of a clerk: ‘woman as clerk’ stands inscribed on the portal of the modern society now taking shape. As she thus seizes new rights, looks to become ‘master’, and inscribes the ‘progress’ of woman on her flags and banners, the reverse is happening with dreadful clarity: woman is retrogressing.
Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown less in the same proportion as her rights and claims have grown greater; and the ‘emancipation of woman’, in so far as it has been demanded and advanced by women themselves (and not only by male shallow- pates), is thus revealed as a noteworthy symptom of the growing enfeeblement and blunting of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart.
To lose her sense for the ground on which she is most sure of victory; to neglect to practise the use of her own proper weapons; to let herself go before the man, perhaps even ‘to the extent of producing a book’, where formerly she kept herself in check and in subtle cunning humility; to seek with virtuous assurance to destroy man's belief that a fundamentally different ideal is wrapped up in woman, that there is something eternally, necessarily feminine; emphatically and loquaciously to talk man out of the idea that woman has to be maintained, cared for, protected, indulged like a delicate, strangely wild and often agreeable domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant parade of all of slavery and bondage that woman's position in the order of society has hitherto entailed and still entails (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of every enhancement of culture) - what does all this mean if not a crumbling of the feminine instinct, a defeminizing? (§ 238)
"Cultivating" Women Makes them Weaker and Kills Their Instincts
To be sure, there are sufficient idiotic friends and corrupters of woman among the learned asses of the male sex who advise woman to defeminize herself in this fashion and to imitate all the stupidities with which ‘man’ in Europe, European ‘manliness’, is sick - who would like to reduce woman to the level of ‘general education’, if not to that of newspaper reading and playing at politics. Here and there they even want to turn women into free-spirits and literati: as if a woman without piety would not be something utterly repellent or ludicrous to a profound and godless man -; almost everywhere her nerves are being shattered by the most morbid and dangerous of all the varieties of music (our latest German music), and she is being rendered more and more hysterical with every day that passes and more and more incapable of her first and last profession, which is to bear strong children.
There is a desire to make her in general more ‘cultivated’ and, as they say, to make the ‘weak sex’ strong through culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner possible that making human beings ‘cultivated’ and making them weaker - that is to say, enfeebling, fragmenting, contaminating, the force of the will, have always gone hand in hand, and that the world's most powerful and influential women (most recently the mother of Napoleon) owed their power and ascendancy over men precisely to the force of their will - and not to schoolmasters! (§ 238)
Part Eight: Peoples and Fatherlands
A Kind of Physics
The old men had obviously grown heated as they thus shouted their ‘truths’ in one another's faces; I, however, in my happiness and beyond, considered how soon a stronger will become master of the strong; and also that when one nation becomes spiritually shallower there is a compensation for it: another nation becomes deeper. — (§ 241)
“Progress” — A Retrospective
Whether that which now distinguishes the European be called ‘civilization’ or ‘humanization’ or ‘progress’; whether one calls it simply, without implying any praise or blame, the democratic movement in Europe: behind all the moral and political foregrounds indicated by such formulas a great physiological process is taking place and gathering greater and ever greater impetus — the process of the assimilation of all Europeans, their growing detachment from the conditions under which races dependent on climate and class originate, their increasing independence of any definite milieu which, through making the same demands for centuries, would like to inscribe itself on soul and body — that is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man which, physiologically speaking, possesses as its typical distinction a maximum of the art and power of adaptation.
This process of the becoming European, the tempo of which can be retarded by great relapses but which will perhaps precisely through them gain in vehemence and depth — the still-raging storm and stress of ‘national feeling’ belongs here, likewise the anarchism now emerging this process will probably lead to results which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of ‘modern ideas’, would be least inclined to anticipate. The same novel conditions which will on average create a levelling and mediocritizing of man — a useful, industrious, highly serviceable and able herd-animal man — are adapted in the highest degree to giving rise to exceptional men of the most dangerous and enticing quality.
For while that power of adaptation which continually tries out changing conditions and begins a new labour with every new generation, almost with every new decade, cannot make possible the powerfulness of the type; while the total impression produced by such future Europeans will probably be that of multifarious, garrulous, weak-willed and highly employable workers who need a master, a commander, as they need their daily bread; while, therefore, the democratization of Europe will lead to the production of a type prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense: in individual and exceptional cases the strong man will be found to turn out stronger and richer than has perhaps ever happened before — thanks to the unprejudiced nature of his schooling, thanks to the tremendous multiplicity of practice, art and mask.
What I mean to say is that the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants — in every sense of that word, including the most spiritual. (§ 242)
Hope That Man Can Overcome Modern Democracies
I hear with pleasure that our sun is moving rapidly in the direction of the constellation of Hercules: and I hope that men on the earth will in this matter emulate the sun. And we at their head, we good Europeans! - (§ 242)
A Thought on Beethoven
The ‘good old days’ are gone, in Mozart they sang themselves out — how fortunate are we that his rococo still speaks to us, that his ‘good company’, his tender enthusiasm, his child-like delight in chinoiserie and ornament, his politeness of the heart, his longing for the graceful, the enamoured, the dancing, the tearful, his faith in the south may still appeal to some residue in us! Alas, some day it will all be gone — but who can doubt that understanding and taste for Beethoven will be gone first! — for Beethoven was only the closing cadence of a transition of style and stylistic breach and not, as Mozart was, the closing cadence of a great centuries-old European taste.
Beethoven is the intermediary between an old mellow soul that is constantly crumbling and a future over-young soul that is constantly arriving; upon his music there lies that twilight of eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope — the same light in which Europe lay bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced around the Revolution's Tree of Liberty and finally almost worshipped before Napoleon. But how quickly this feeling is now fading away, how hard it is today even to know of this feeling — how strange to our ears sounds the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, Byron, in whom together the same European destiny that in Beethoven knew how to sing found its way into words! - (§ 245)
Part Nine: What is Noble?
The Pathos of Distance — Necessary
Every elevation of the type ‘man’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society — and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other. Without the pathos of distance such as develops from the incarnate differences of classes, from the ruling caste's constant looking out and looking down on subjects and instruments and from its equally constant exercise of obedience and command, its holding down and holding at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have developed either, that longing for an ever-increasing widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, more remote, tenser, more comprehensive states, in short precisely the elevation of the type ‘man’, the continual ‘self-overcoming of man’, to take a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. (§ 257)
Aristocratic Cultures Begin By “Swooping Down”
As to how an aristocratic society (that is to say, the precondition for this elevation of the type ‘man’) originates, one ought not to yield to any humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. Let us admit to ourselves unflinchingly how every higher culture on earth has hitherto begun ! Men of a still natural nature, barbarians in every fearful sense of the word, men of prey still in possession of an unbroken strength of will and lust for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or upon old mellow cultures, the last vital forces in which were even then flickering out in a glittering firework display of spirit and corruption. The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical — they were more complete human beings (which, on every level, also means as much as ‘more complete beasts’ —) (§ 257)
A Healthy Aristocracy Justifies Itself
The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is, however, that it does not feel itself to be a function (of the monarchy or of the commonwealth) but as their meaning and supreme justification — that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental faith must be that society should not exist for the sake of society but only as foundation and scaffolding upon which a select species of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and in general to a higher existence: like those sun-seeking climbing plants of Java — they are named sipo matador — which clasp an oak-tree with their tendrils so long and often that at last, high above it but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and display their happiness. (§ 258)
Critique of Modern Communist Utopian Dreams
On no point, however, is the common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states of society in which there will be ‘no more exploitation’ — that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. ‘Exploitation’ does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will of life. - Granted this is a novelty as a theory — as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves! - (§ 259)
Two Basic Types of Morality: Master and Slave
In a tour of the many finer and coarser moralities which have ruled or still rule on earth I found certain traits regularly recurring together and bound up with one another: until at length two basic types were revealed and a basic distinction emerged. There is master morality and slave morality — I add at once that in all higher and mixed cultures attempts at mediation between the two are apparent and more frequently confusion and mutual misunderstanding between them, indeed sometimes their harsh juxtaposition — even within the same man, within one soul. (§ 260)
Master Morality Despises Utilitarians, the Dog-Type Man
The moral value- distinctions have arisen either among a ruling order which was pleasurably conscious of its distinction from the ruled — or among the ruled, the slaves and dependents of every degree. In the former case, when it is the rulers who determine the concept ‘good’, it is the exalted, proud states of soul which are considered distinguishing and determine the order of rank.
The noble human being separates from himself those natures in which the opposite of such exalted proud states find expression: he despises them. It should be noted at once that in this first type of morality the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’ means the same thing as ‘noble’ and ‘despicable’ — the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad' originates elsewhere. The cowardly, the timid, the petty, and those who think only of narrow utility are despised; as are the mistrustful with their constricted glance, those who abase themselves, the dog-like type of man who lets himself be mistreated, the fawning flatterer, above all the liar — it is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people are liars. ‘We who are truthful’ — thus did the nobility of ancient Greece designate themselves. (§ 260)
The Noble Man is Determines Values
The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges ‘what harms me is harmful in itself’, he knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates values. Everything he knows to be part of himself, he honours: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of plenitude, of power which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would like to give away and bestow — the noble human being too aids the unfortunate but not, or almost not, from pity, but more from an urge begotten by superfluity of power. The noble human being honours in himself the man of power, also the man who has power over himself, who understands how to speak and how to keep silent, who enjoys practising severity and harshness upon himself and feels reverence for all that is severe and harsh.
‘A hard heart has Wotan set in my breast’, it says in an old Scandinavian saga: a just expression coming from the soul of a proud Viking. A man of this type is actually proud that he is not made for pity: which is why the hero of the saga adds as a warning: ‘he whose heart is not hard in youth will never have a hard heart’. Brave and noble men who think that are at the farthest remove from that morality which sees the mark of the moral precisely in pity or in acting for others or in desinteressement; belief in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony for ‘selflessness’ belong just as definitely to noble morality as does a mild contempt for and caution against sympathy and the ‘warm heart’. — (§ 260)
Master Morality Is Unintelligible to Modern Slave Morality
It is the powerful who understand how to honour, that is their art, their realm of invention. Deep reverence for age and the traditional — all law rests on this twofold reverence — belief in and prejudice in favour of ancestors and against descendants, is typical of the morality of the powerful; and when, conversely, men of ‘modern ideas’ believe almost instinctively in ‘progress’ and ‘the future’ and show an increasing lack of respect for age, this reveals clearly enough the ignoble origin of these ‘ideas’. A morality of the rulers is, however, most alien and painful to contemporary taste in the severity of its principle that one has duties only towards one's equals; that towards beings of a lower rank, towards everything alien, one may act as one wishes or ‘as the heart dictates’ and in any case ‘beyond good and evil’— : it is here that pity and the like can have a place. The capacity for and the duty of protracted gratitude and protracted revenge — both only among one's equals — subtlety in requital, a refined conception of friendship, a certain need to have enemies (as conduit systems, as it were, for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance - fundamentally so as to be able to be a good friend): all these are typical marks of noble morality which, as previously indicated, is not the morality of ‘modern ideas’ and is therefore hard to enter into today, also hard to unearth and uncover. — (§ 260)
Slave Morality Is Fundamentally Resentful
It is otherwise with the second type of morality, slave morality. Suppose the abused, oppressed, suffering, unfree, those uncertain of themselves and weary should moralize: what would their moral evaluations have in common? Probably a pessimistic mistrust of the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man together with his situation. The slave is suspicious of the virtues of the powerful: he is sceptical and mistrustful, keenly mistrustful, of everything ‘good’ that is honoured among them — he would like to convince himself that happiness itself is not genuine among them. (§ 260)
Slave Morality is Essentially the Morality of Utility
On the other hand, those qualities which serve to make easier the existence of the suffering will be brought into prominence and flooded with light: here it is that pity, the kind and helping hand, the warm heart, patience, industriousness, humility, friendliness come into honour — for here these are the most useful qualities and virtually the only means of enduring the burden of existence. Slave morality is essentially the morality of utility. (§ 260)
Slave Morality: The Good Man is a Harmless Man
Here is the source of the famous antithesis ‘good’ and ‘evil - power and danger were felt to exist in evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety and strength which could not admit of contempt. Thus, according to slave morality the ‘evil’ inspire fear; according to master morality it is precisely the ‘good’ who inspire fear and want to inspire it, while the ‘bad’ man is judged contemptible. The antithesis reaches its height when, consistently with slave morality, a breath of disdain finally also comes to be attached to the ‘good’ of this morality - it may be a slight and benevolent disdain - because within the slaves' way of thinking the good man has in any event to be a harmless man: he is good-natured, easy to deceive, perhaps a bit stupid, un bonhomme. Wherever slave morality comes to predominate, language exhibits a tendency to bring the words ‘good’ and ‘stupid’ closer to each other. — (§ 260)
Spiritual Hardening
A species arises, a type becomes fixed and strong, through protracted struggle against essentially constant unfavourable conditions. Conversely, one knows from the experience of breeders that species which receive plentiful nourishment and an excess of care and protection soon tend very strongly to produce variations of their type and are rich in marvels and monstrosities (also in monstrous vices).
Now look for once at an aristocratic community, Venice, say, or an ancient Greek polis, as a voluntary or involuntary contrivance for the purpose of breeding: there there are human beings living together and thrown on their own resources who want their species to prevail usually because they have to prevail or run the terrible risk of being exterminated. Here those favourable conditions, that excess, that protection which favours variations, is lacking; the species needs itself as species, as something that can prevail and purchase durability in its continual struggle against its neighbours or against the oppressed in revolt or threatening revolt, precisely by virtue of its hardness, uniformity, simplicity of form.
The most manifold experience teaches it which qualities it has principally to thank that, in spite of all gods and men, it still exists and has always been victorious: these qualities it calls virtues, these virtues alone does it breed and cultivate. It does so with severity, indeed it wants severity; every aristocratic morality is intolerant, in the education of the young, in the measures it takes with respect to women, in marriage customs, in the relations between young and old, in the penal laws (which are directed only at variants) — it counts intolerance itself among the virtues under the name ‘justice’. A type with few but very marked traits, a species of stern, warlike, prudently silent, determined and taciturn men (and, as such, men of the finest feeling for the charm and nuances of society), is in this way firmly fixed beyond the changes of generations; continual struggle against ever- constant unfavourable conditions is, as aforesaid, that which fixes and hardens a type. (§ 262)
Spiritual Softening
In the end, however, there arises one day an easier state of affairs and the tremendous tension relaxes; perhaps there are no longer any enemies among their neighbours, and the means of life, even for the enjoyment of life, are there in plenty. With one stroke the bond and constraint of the ancient discipline is broken: it is no longer felt to be a necessity, a condition of existence — if it were to persist it could be only as a form of luxury, as an archaizing taste. Variation, whether as deviation (into the higher, rarer, more refined) or as degeneration and monstrosity, is suddenly on the scene in the greatest splendor and abundance, the individual dares to be individual and stand out.
At these turning-points of history there appear side by side and often entangled and entwined together a glorious, manifold, junglelike growth and up-stirring, a kind of tropical tempo in competition in growing, and a tremendous perishing and self- destruction, thanks to the savage egoisms which, turning on one another and as it were exploding, wrestle together ‘for sun and light’ and no longer know how to draw any limitation, any restraint, any forbearance from the morality reigning hitherto. It was this morality which stored up such enormous energy, which bent the bow in such a threatening manner — now it is ‘spent’, now it is becoming ‘outlived’.
The dangerous and uncanny point is reached where the grander, more manifold, more comprehensive life lives beyond the old morality; the ‘individual’ stands there, reduced to his own law- giving, to his own arts and stratagems for self-preservation, self-enhancement, self¬ redemption. Nothing but new whys and wherewithal, no longer any common formulas, misunderstanding in alliance with disrespect, decay, corruption and the highest desires horribly tangled together, the genius of the race overflowing out of every cornucopia of good and bad, spring and autumn falling fatally together, full of novel charms and veils such as pertain to youthful, still unexhausted, still unwearied corruption. Danger is again present, the mother of morality, great danger, only this time it comes from the individual, from neighbour and friend, from the street, from one's own child, from one's own heart, from the most personal and secret recesses of wish and will: what will the moral philosophers who come up in this age now have to preach?
They discover, these acute observers and idlers, that the end is fast approaching, that everything around them is corrupt and corrupting, that nothing can last beyond the day after tomorrow, one species of man excepted, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have the prospect of continuing on and propagating themselves - they are the men of the future, the sole survivors; ‘be like them! become mediocre!’ is henceforth the only morality that has any meaning left, that still finds ears to hear it. — But it is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! — for it can never admit what it is and what it wants! it has to speak of moderation and dignity and duty and love of one's neighbour — it will scarcely be able to conceal its irony! — (§ 262)
Modern Man Lacks the Instinct for Rank
There is an instinct for rank which is more than anything else already the sign of a high rank; there is a delight in the nuances of reverence, which reveals a noble origin and noble habits. The refinement, goodness and loftiness of a soul is put to a perilous test whenever something passes before it that is of the first rank but not yet protected from importunate clumsiness and claws by the awe of authority: something that goes its way unsignalized, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps arbitrarily obscured and disguised, like a living touchstone. He whose task and practice it is to explore the soul will avail himself of precisely this art in many forms in order to determine the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will test it for its instinct of reverence.
Difference engendre haine: the commonness of some natures suddenly spurts up like dirty water whenever some sacred vessel, some precious object from a closed shrine, some book with the marks of a great destiny is carried by; and on the other hand there is an involuntary falling silent, a hesitation of the eye, a cessation of all gestures, which reveal that a soul feels the proximity of something most worthy of respect. The way in which reverence for the Bible has hitherto been generally maintained in Europe is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of manners that Europe owes to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate significance require for their protection an external tyranny of authority, in order that they may achieve those millennia of continued existence which are needed if they are to be exhausted and unriddled.
Much has been gained when the feeling has at last been instilled into the masses (into the shallow-pates and greedy-guts of every sort) that there are things they must not touch; that there are holy experiences before which they have to take off their shoes and keep their unclean hands away — it is almost their highest advance towards humanity. Conversely, there is perhaps nothing about the so-called cultured, the believers in ‘modern ideas’, that arouses so much disgust as their lack of shame, the self-satisfied insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, lick and fumble with everything; and it is possible that more relative nobility of taste and reverential tact is to be discovered today among the people, among the lower orders and especially among peasants, than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, the cultured. (§ 263)
The Plebeian Spirit Is Just Some People's Nature
That which his ancestors most liked to do and most constantly did cannot be erased from a man's soul: whether, for instance, they were diligent savers and the accessories of a desk and cash-box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, modest also in their virtues; or whether they lived accustomed to commanding from morn to night, fond of rough amusements and perhaps of even rougher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they at some time or other sacrificed ancient privileges of birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith — for their ‘god’ — as men of an inexorable and tender conscience which blushes at all half-measures.
It is quite impossible that a man should not have in his body the qualities and preferences of his parents and forefathers: whatever appearances may say to the contrary. This constitutes the problem of race. If one knows something about the parents, it is permissible to draw a conclusion about the child: any sort of untoward intemperance, any sort of narrow enviousness, a clumsy obstinate self-assertiveness — these three things together have at all times constituted the characteristics of the plebeian type — qualities of this sort must be transferred to the child as surely as bad blood; and the best education and culture will succeed only in deceiving with regard to such an inheritance. —
And what else is the objective of education and culture today? In our very democratic, that is to say plebeian age, ‘education’ and ‘culture’ have to be in essence the art of deceiving - of deceiving with regard to origins, to the inherited plebeian in soul and body. An educator who today preached truthfulness above all and continually cried to his pupils ‘Be true! Be natural! Give yourselves out for what you are!’ - even such a virtuous and simple ass would after a time learn to reach for that furca of Horace to naturam expellere : with what success? ‘The plebeian’ usque recurret. (§ 264)
Egoism is the Essence of the Noble Soul
At the risk of annoying innocent ears I set it down that egoism pertains to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the immovable faith that to a being such as ‘we are’ other beings have to be subordinate by their nature, and sacrifice themselves to us. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without any question-mark, also without feeling any severity, constraint, caprice in it, but rather as something that may be grounded in the primal law of things: - if it sought a name for it, it would say ‘it is justice itself'. (§ 265)
Equality Only Among Equals
Under certain circumstances which make it hesitate at first, it will admit that there are others with rights equal to its own; as soon as it is clear as to this question of rank, it moves among these its equals and equal-in-rights with the same sure modesty and tender reverence as it applies to itself — in accordance with an innate celestial mechanism which all stars understand. This refinement and self-limitation in traffic with its equals is one more aspect of its egoism — every star is such an egoist — : it honours itself in them and in the rights it concedes them, it is in no doubt that the exchange of honours and rights, as the essence of social intercourse, is likewise part of the natural condition of things.
The noble soul gives as it takes, out of the passionate and sensitive instinct of requital which lies in its depths. The concept ‘favour’ has no meaning or good odour inter pares; there may be a sublime way of letting gifts from above as it were befall one and drinking them up thirstily like drops: but for this sort of behaviour the noble soul has no aptitude. Its egoism hinders it here: it does not like to look ‘up’ at all — it prefers to look either in front, horizontally and slowly, or down - it knows it is at a height. — (§ 265)
Basic Tendency In Late Civilization
The Chinese have a proverb which mothers even teach their children: siao-sin : ‘Make your heart small!' This is the characteristic basic tendency in late civilizations: I do not doubt that the first thing an ancient Greek would remark in us Europeans of today would also be self-diminution — through that alone we should be ‘contrary to his taste’. (§ 267)
The Common Instinct is Often the Herd Instinct
Exactly which groups of sensations are awakened, begin to speak, issue commands most quickly within a soul, is decisive for the whole order of rank of its values and ultimately determines its table of desiderata. A human being's evaluations betray something of the structure of his soul and where it sees its conditions of life, its real needs. Now supposing that need has at all times brought together only such human beings as could indicate similar requirements, similar experiences by means of similar signs, it follows that on the whole the easy communicability of need, that is to say ultimately the experiencing of only average and common experiences, must have been the most powerful of all the powerful forces which have disposed of mankind hitherto. The more similar, more ordinary human beings have had and still have the advantage, the more select, subtle, rare and harder to understand are liable to remain alone, succumb to accidents in their isolation and seldom propagate themselves. Tremendous counter-forces have to be called upon to cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the continuing development of mankind into the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike — into the common! (§ 268)
Pity Habitually Deceives Itself About Its Strength
Woman — who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering and unfortunately also eager to help and save far beyond her power to do so — those outbursts of boundless, most devoted pity which the mob, above all the venerating mob, fails to understand and loads with inquisitive and self-satisfied interpretations. This pity habitually deceives itself about its strength; woman would like to believe that love can do everything — it is her characteristic faith. Alas, he who knows the heart divines how poor, stupid, helpless, arrogant, blundering, more prone to destroy than save is even the best and deepest love! (§ 269)
Signs of Nobility
Never to think of degrading our duties into duties for everybody; not to want to relinquish or share our own responsibilities; to count our privileges and the exercising of them among our duties. (§ 272)
The Problem Of Those Who Wait
The problem of those who wait — It requires luck and much that is incalculable if a higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a problem is to act - ‘break out’ one might say - at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and in every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to what extent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the awakening call, that chance event which gives ‘permission’ to act, comes but too late - when the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used up in sitting still; and how many a man has discovered to his horror when he ‘rose up’ that his limbs had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! ‘It is too late’ - he has said to himself, having lost faith in himself and henceforth for ever useless. Could it be that, in the realm of genius, ‘Raphael without hands’ is, taking the phrase in its widest sense, not the exception but the rule? — Perhaps genius is not so very rare: perhaps what is rare is the five hundred hands needed to tyrannize over the kairos, ‘the right time’ - to take chance by the forelock! (§ 274)
A Few Arrows
He who does not want to see what is elevated in a man looks all the more keenly for what is low and foreground in him - and thereby gives himself away. (§ 275)
Men of profound sorrow give themselves away when they are happy: they have a way of grasping happiness as if they wanted to crush and smother it, from jealousy - alas, they know too well that it will flee away. (§ 279)
‘Bad! Bad! What? Is he not going - backwards?’ - Yes! But you ill understand him if you complain about it. He goes backwards as everyone goes backwards who wants to take a big jump. — (§ 280)
Modernity Provokes Noble Men
‘But whatever has happened to you?’ — ‘I don't know,’ he said, hesitating; ‘perhaps the Harpies flew over my table.’ — It sometimes happens today that a mild, moderate, reserved man suddenly breaks out into a rage, smashes the plates, throws the table over, screams, raves, insults everybody — and ends by going off ashamed, furious with himself - where? why? To starve all alone? To choke on his recollections? — He who has the desires of an elevated, fastidious soul, and rarely finds his table laid and his food ready, will be in great danger at all times: but today the danger he is in has become extraordinary. Thrown into a noisy and plebeian age with which he has no wish to eat out of the same dish, he can easily perish of hunger and thirst, or, if he does eventually ‘set to’ - of a sudden nausea. — We have all no doubt eaten at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual of us who are most difficult to feed know that dangerous dyspepsia which comes from a sudden insight and disappointment about our food and table-companions — the after-dinner nausea. (§ 282)
What Is Noble?
— What is noble? What does the word ‘noble’ mean to us today? What, beneath this heavy, overcast sky of the beginning rule of the rabble which makes everything leaden and opaque, betrays and makes evident the noble human being? — It is not his actions which reveal him — actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable —; neither is it his ‘works’. One finds today among artists and scholars sufficient who reveal by their works that they are driven on by a profound desire for the noble: but precisely this need for the noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and in fact an eloquent and dangerous sign of its lack. It is not the works, it is the faith which is decisive here, which determines the order of rank here, to employ an old religious formula in a new and deeper sense: some fundamental certainty which a noble soul possesses in regard to itself, something which may not be sought or found and perhaps may not be lost either. — The noble soul has reverence for itself. (§ 287)
The Cult of Suffering
A man who says: ‘I like this, I take it for my own and mean to protect it and defend it against everyone’; a man who can do something, carry out a decision, remain true to an idea, hold on to a woman, punish and put down insolence; a man who has his anger and his sword and to whom the weak, suffering, oppressed, and the animals too are glad to submit and belong by nature, in short a man who is by nature a master — when such a man has pity, well! that pity has value! But of what account is the pity of those who suffer! Or, worse, of those who preach pity! There exists almost everywhere in Europe today a morbid sensitivity and susceptibility to pain, likewise a repellent intemperance in lamentation, a tenderization which, with the aid of religion and odds and ends of philosophy, would like to deck itself out as something higher - there exists a downright cult of suffering. The unmanliness of that which is in such fanatic circles baptized ‘pity’ is, I think, the first thing which leaps to the eye. — This latest species of bad taste must be resolutely and radically excommunicated; and I would like to see the good amulet ‘gai saber’ worn around neck and hearts so as to ward it off — ‘gay science’, to make the matter plain. (§ 293)
The Olympian Vice: Golden Laughter
The Olympian vice - In spite of that philosopher who, being a real Englishman, sought to bring laughter into disrepute among all thinking minds — ‘laughter is a bad infirmity of human nature which every thinking man will endeavour to overcome’ (Hobbes) — I would go so far as to venture an order of rank among philosophers according to the rank of their laughter — rising to those capable of golden laughter. And if gods too philosophize, as many an inference has driven me to suppose -I do not doubt that while doing so they also know how to laugh in a new and superhuman way — and at the expense of all serious things! Gods are fond of mockery: it seems they cannot refrain from laughter even when sacraments are in progress. (§ 294)
Formidable work thank you